1. A free preliminary discussion to review your needs and confirm that this process is appropriate. (half hour by phone or in person). 

2. A questionnaire, drawing out more information about your short and long-term aspirations regarding funding, income, ownership, engagement etc.  (to be completed and returned by email in advance of stage 3).

3. A meeting to review the questionnaire and go through each of the relevant legal structures. We've created an easy to follow format which strips down each structure to key advantages and disadvantages and enables you to make clear comparisons.  (this meeting will be in person or by teleconference).

We created this short Prezi for International Women's Day 2011.  It went a little bit viral on twitter and resulted in a great deal of positive feedback, interestingly as much from men as women.  Which is great, as the key point is ultimately that gender balance is best for people, planet and profit. 

Here are a small selection of email comments:  "Very impressive! Attention-grabbing and thoughtful." "I found that presentation really brilliant. Thank you." "I absolutely loved this presentation of yours.  The information is so well presented and the facts stack up (sadly) beautifully."
 

To view the Prezi click on the link, then click through or set to autoplay: http://bit.ly/gpSstB

There was a big step forward in the debate about female leadership today: the language shifted.  For the first time the Financial Times used the word 'balance' in their headline, rather than 'diversity'. This prompted me to dig out an article on the topic I prepared for the a Guardian 'Women in Business' supplement in 2009...I thought so,  I had headlined with 'balance' in my op-ed foreword.  When the mainstream gets it you know that change has taken root. Here is the article...

As the UK faces the toughest economic climate in over 50 years, it is time for the business world to review, learn and get smarter.  Women in business are a critical part of the solution.

The evidence is now compelling that having more women at the top in business improves performance.  Report after report confirms that Boards and senior management teams with at least 30% female members perform better in every area of operations and leadership and return profits three times higher.  It is clearly time to dilute and diversify the male monoculture running our companies. 

Darwin found that species-rich communities have a greater level of productivity.  That is true of business too.  There is even a mathematical formula to show that a diverse group almost always outperforms a homogeneous group by a substantial margin. 

Despite this, chasmic gender leadership and pay gaps remain across the business spectrum.  More and more talented women are opting out and building their own businesses on their own terms instead.  We now have more than 1 million women who work for themselves.  

Those entrepreneurial women comprise a quiet revolution, changing the face of business from the bottom up.  In common with women throughout the world, they are investing higher levels of their wealth and time to support their community and family.  They are also generally more values-led and at the forefront of ethical and environmental businesses.   While women comprise just 14% of all business owners, they are 50% of social enterprise leaders. 

In the Darwinian sense again, those women-led businesses are 'fit' and should be better able to survive the economic storm.  They tend to have lower levels of debt, are more likely to have businesses plans and processes in place and to take-up business support and training opportunities.  But female dominated sectors like retail, hospitality and services are in the eye of this recessionary storm, and so far Government support has been focused on male led industries. With women being made redundant at double the rate of men in the last quarter, there are real worries that the progress made towards equality at work could be jeopardised.   

There is now no question that gender-balanced business leadership is important for business and social wellbeing.  But it will not be achieved without smart actions that protect equality and get behind talented women. 

Optimism and chance are the two key factors in entrepreneurial success, according to leading enterprise academic Prof. David Storey.  Full details of Storey's new research will be published in a journal next year, but I was able to get a preview at last week's Enterprise and Small Business academics' annual gathering: the ISBE conference.

Storey finds no impact from training in enterprise skills or from prior experience or forecasting.  Americans' often quoted ability to learn from failure was also rejected by his analysis: previous failure makes no difference to your chance of succeeding, but the cultural optimism of Americans does.

According to Storey, business owners don't just need psychological resilience, they also need the wealth to withstand economic turbulence, until their business gets that lucky break.  In an ensuing discussion, Ron Botham suggested that Storey's conclusions could be a case for 'enterprise for all'.  Botham's own powerful new report (summarised in EFAN discussion) suggests that the majority of new jobs are created by very small businesses.  But despite his findings that only 3/20, of the tiny proportion, of firms selected for support by Venture Capitalists actually succeed, Storey still prefers a 'picking winners' approach focused on well capitalised 'high quality' businesses.  There was an inevitable exchange fairly dismissive of the growth potential of trades like hairdressers: "ah yes, but there are some highly innovative hairdressers too" retorted Botham.  Nicky Clarke, Vidal Sassoon, Toni & Guy anyone?  All self-made I think, like the majority of entrepreneurs and millionaires.

While Storey argues that wealth is an essential underpinning for his optimism and chance thesis, economic resilience can also be achieved by the kind of relentless bootstrapping many of our best known entrepreneurs are renowned for: pushing down personal and business costs, growing through low-cost promotion and customer supported cashflow.  Bill Gates is the most famous example, when he started Microsoft he secured his first major customer, IBM, before he'd completed the product he had sold them.  Capital driven start-up as advocated by Storey is fine for some, but I've certainly seen too many seduced by easy money and big business dreams in the last decade: losing their shirts/ blouses in the process.  Slow and steady is a better route for most: risk aware, not risk blind.  It's also an approach that ultimately results in significantly more jobs for the UK economy and fosters an environment which enables those high growth opportunities.

The two fundamental core points of Storey's thesis - optimism and chance - do chime with my own experience of supporting people to start and grow businesses. However I wouldn't discount enterprise education.  More segmented research shows that it makes a significant difference to women who start businesses (GEM UK 2005).  This is where self-efficacy comes in - optimism about your own ability and capacity to accomplish a task.   Women are notoriously less confident in their abilities than men, for example the average man will take a punt on applying for a job when he meets something like 50% of the criteria; most women by contrast need to meet over 80% before they will apply.    Training helps women's confidence and optimism to grow; for that reason it's important for anyone whose confidence is low or has taken a knock: including those made redundant, the over 50s who feel left behind.  Self-efficacy is also massively helped by good quality mentoring and business coaching.   It's a case for transformational, bespoke, relational business support; and if you believe, as I do, that confidence and optimism can be built; then it's also a case for enterprise for all.   

Image © flickr.com/photos/kaibara/

Nobel peace prize winner, Muhammad Yunus says:  "All human beings are born entrepreneurs. Some get a chance to unleash that capacity. Some never get the chance, never know that he or she has that capacity."   I completely agree.  But where I part company from Yunus is his famous statement that "access to credit should be a human right".  I don't think it goes far enough.  Now more than ever - with a jobless recovery, diminishing pensions and safety nets and an uncertain environment - not having the skills and freedom to work for yourself is a critical handicap. I'd extend Yunus's call and say that 'access to enterprise should be a human right".

In much of the world, credit is the key that opens the door to enterprise opportunities.  But in Europe, for the majority of the entrepreneurial poor and excluded, our more complex environment means that we don't need just one key - we need a prison warder's big jangling bunch of keys.

The premise of this conference is one of those keys.  Skilled business support is needed to help steer many new businesses through the complexities and risks of starting a business. But it needs to be focused on the businesses needs - not, as so often in the past few years, primarily focused on meeting the provider's funding targets.  Community based business advice reaches those who, as Yunus puts it "would never know that they had that capacity".  People who would never in a million years start their enterprise journey by ringing Business Link.

Up-skilling is important because traditional business advice isn't enough.  Disadvantaged communities and groups lack confidence and capital- financial, social and human capital. So they need business advisers who can help them develop personal as well as business skills - soft skills as well as hard.  Information-based, short-sharp interventions won't do; long-term, relational, community-based business support will.

Another key is the welfare benefits trap.  For many, the risk of losing benefit is - or can appear to be - greater than the reward, especially when there are dependants, unstable health or a precarious residency status. Good business support can help reduce some of those risks.   But not all.    The earning disregard for example.  We  need better government policies and programmes. .  We can also learn a lot from European partners in this area.  Spain - where benefits can be front-loaded to capitalise new businesses- and France where cooperative legal structures can be used to provide a protected test trading period.

Access is a key and there are a whole range of practical and cultural issues - too many to go into today. 

And yes we need the key of access to credit too.

This is a time of huge economic and political change all over Europe.  Some of the changes will free-up entrepreneurial potential and let it come bubbling up.  Already in the UK, Enterprise Minister Mark Prisk, has committed to removing the regulations which stop social housing tenants running businesses from their homes.  Progressive 'earnings disregards' are back on the agenda and we're waiting to see if the Government's proposed 'Working for Yourself' scheme will be anything like the brilliant 1980s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which enabled people on benefits to trade, still claim their benefits and get support for caring costs [update the New Enterprise Allowance has been announced by Iain Duncan Smith, but so far it's a much poorer version of the 1980s model].

In the meantime there's a vacuum and a pull-back.  Great community based business programmes are closing, resource banks vanishing from the internet.  And in the midst of this jobless recovery, precious little support for the newly jobless who want or need to start businesses. As is the fate of all keys eventually - the bunch of keys has definitely been lost!

In the meantime - what can those of us committed to 'enterprise for all' do?

The mass axing of business support for disadvantaged groups - at a time when it is more necessary than ever -  reminds me of Dr Seuss's Lorax.  The Lorax is a gentle but persistent soul who 'speaks for the trees' as the greedy Once-ler, devastates the forest to build his business empire.   The Lorax finds other homes for the animals who live in the forest and leaves when he can do no more.  In the end, long after he has chopped down the last tree and is left alone and miserable in the wasteland, the Once-ler considers the last remaining seed and remembers the Lorax's last word, written on a pile of stones:  "unless".    

And at this time, the Lorax is a pretty good role model.

We can 'speak for the trees': speak truth to power and make sure that the voice of the entrepreneurial poor is heard by those in power.   Respond to consultations, get involved in the development of our local LEP, write letters (to Ministers, the press, councillors), invite them to visit,  get case studies out there, blog and tweet - in the digital age there is no end to how you can get your message out.

We can find safe places for resources and frameworks, ideas, training programmes, research and toolkits.  Communities of practice, like COPIE, Wikipreneurship and the linkedin Enterprise for All Network, provide repositories and informal incubators for information and networks.

And we can plant positive seeds and strong resonant messages. If we look at the UK context again - which no doubt is reflected in many of the partner countries here today -   we have a positive and highly relevant story to tell, which fits lots of agendas, including anti red-tape, localism and big society.

Red-tape:  This government is anti red-tape and inappropriate benefits red-tape is one of the biggest barriers to potential and enterprise opportunity for the socially excluded.   DWP seems to get the need for welfare tapers.

Localism: Community based business support is an exemplar of the best of economic localism - local organisations and people working together to help themselves and their community.

Big society: it's a complex debate, but at its best it's about empowerment of individuals and communities.  Local enterprise, enterprising people and social enterprise have to be critical drivers of a Big Society, whatever shape it emerges as.

So there's a lot to build on.  Enterprise skills have never been more critical.  Community based business advice never more important.  

But will those obvious facts be taken into account, by those in power.  Well probably not.  Unless... 

Unless -  people like us do something.   There is a moment to seize.  What will you do?

Summarised version of keynote presentation to the ACBBA/ Sfedi European Community Based Business Adviser Conference, London 13 Sept 2010.

Recently I've been involved in setting up and managing the Enterprise for All Network (EfAN), an online forum of almost 100 'enterprise' professionals who are concerned about the place of enterprise promotion and business support within the Coalition Government's proposed new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).  Over the past few weeks forum members have shared views and experience, while contributing to, monitoring and discussing developments of LEPs at national and local levels.  With Rob Weaver of C3consulting, I pulled together and edited a briefing note, which summarizes key conclusions to date.  We believe it makes an important contribution to LEPs' debates and development around the country and we urge nascent LEPs and their advisers to consider its findings as they shape their proposals.

We identified seven principles that we believe should be adhered to in shaping the delivery of enterprise support within LEPs:

• Enterprise and Business Support must be central to LEPs' role
• Engagement not just representation.
• Localism not parochialism
• Enterprise Inclusion is a competitive opportunity.
• Client-centred approach
• Take micro-business seriously
• Procurement and Local Business

Ruth Sutherland, Business Editor of the Observer, reported today on Deauville, the Women's International economic summit.  The illustration above beautifully sums up the event buzz: in a nutshell, the impact of the financial crisis needs holistic and long-term responses and to take into account the context of climate change, food supply, health and governance. 

Women in developing countries are taking the brunt of the crisis: girls are the first to be taken out of school, and the last to eat, as resources tighten.  Enterprise development, especially methods like micro-credit, which put resources directly into the hands of women can help.  But elsewhere, reports suggest that this recession is in contrast to others, resulting in a significant contraction of the informal sector in many developing countries.  The potential of the micro-enterprise sector to provide a financial cushion has shrunk considerably. 

Women are a safe and lucrative investment: much more likely to use earnings to develop their family and community.  A fact just confirmed, yet again, by a new report from Goldman Sachs. 

The message from Deauville is that women do things differently and it is more important than ever that their voices are fairly represented in corporate and political power structures.   As Einstein put it, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Emma Harrison, founder and Chair of leading welfare to work provider A4e, has called this week for a 'benefits buffer', which would cushion the sharp transition from welfare benefits into work (or starting a business).  "It's very, very frightening if you're on benefits, to take a job," she says in the Guardian , highlighting worries about the sharp removal of secondary benefits, like housing benefit.  "If you've been unemployed for a long time, you don't have a great stock of food in your cupboard. You don't have a buffer. If you take a job and something goes wrong you can't go back to your stocked up cupboard, because it's empty. And if you have got kids, it's just untenable".

She is absolutely right.  It's has been a persistent problem, for potential entrepreneurs on the margins, for the last couple of decades.  Lobbying about this issue was a feature of my career for many years.  In 2003 along with colleagues from Community Links , who continue to do sterling work in this area, we were invited to have a meeting with the then top Treasury Mandarin, about the issue. Fascinating. A three hour meeting, where with his team he tried to demolish and deter our arguments in a most 'Sir Humphrey' manner. Ministers were keen, but the Treasury wasn't budging. Later I co-wrote a report 'Who Benefits: the difficulties for women in making the transition from unemployment to self-employment ' which helped to sharpen up the evidence.  Over half of women start businesses part-time and generally women start their businesses more gradually.  If they have the resources to get through the first few years of business start-up, this feminine starting pace is no less successful than the faster male approach.  But the benefits system doesn't take pace into account. One day you are on benefits; the next day you're not.  And if it doesn't work out, getting all your benefits back in order is not quick or easy. With kids? Just untenable, as Harrison says.

Ian Duncain Smith's Centre for Social Justice  has just reached similar conclusions in a major report for the Conservatives.  I don't agree with all of his recommendations, but the principal of a benefits buffer or taper could be critical in freeing a lot of people from benefits traps and withered potential. I'm glad it's back on the table for debate.